> 3-4 hour daily commute
It saddens me that anyone thinks this is acceptable. I know some people don't mind it, but what a waste of your life to do this for any extended period of time.
It saddens me that anyone thinks this is acceptable. I know some people don't mind it, but what a waste of your life to do this for any extended period of time.
There is no way you could pay me to give up a year and a half of my family.
By agreeing to participate in the work process, most people these days "give up" not 25 days a year, but full 100. Of course, there is a price tag they put on that time -- the salary.
This single-minded "family time is infinitely more valuable than work time" sentiment doesn't seem to match people's actions in reality. It looks more like some new-age signalling process; a (recent?) social phenomenon.
You are taking the argument to the other extreme: "Family time is SOOOO important, why are you even working? hypocrite"
Of course he has to "trade family time for work" aka salary. Of course he has to spend (probably) 40 hours a week (not including lunch/driving) to keep the bills paid... Everyone - except lottery winners, retired people, those lucky to be born into money, etc - has to do that.
But, as with anything, there comes a tipping point where the time spent isn't worth they money earned.
Assuming he was paid $100k (just a made up number), at 40 hours a week and 30 hours of driving, he would get paid ~$27/hour. (100k / 70 hours / 52 weeks)
If he cuts his pay to $75k (25% pay cut) and instead drives 30 minutes per day, he's now getting paid $29/hour (75k / 45 hours / 52 weeks). He "nets" less, but gets paid more per hour and has more time for "important" things.
Those are made up numbers, but for a "pay cut" he could get paid more per hour and have more time at home.
Does he quit because "family time is infinitely more important"? No... he's not an extremist that has to pull some basic, common-sense notion to an absurd degree. He made a trade off: It's called reality for most people.
That the family-work ratio cannot be extreme, and is very much a personal tradeoff, was the whole point of my post. I am baffled -- what exactly are you arguing against? It seems you're agreeing with a vengeance.
What I saw was the OP saying "I saved time commuting, all good" (doh). Then you came in with "no way you could pay me to give up family time", which sounds extremely... extreme.
If that wasn't the core of your message, what was?
What are the absurd assumptions?
Seeing people saying, "It's me time." is a bit disconcerting. Respectfully as an opinion, spending between 2 and 4+ hours a day sitting on a bus/train is not "me time". Why do I think that? Because of what I suspect the answer to this question would be: If you had 2 free hours at home would you spend it doing the exact same task that you would do for 2 hours on a bus?
I understand that a two plus hour commute is a choice and obviously there are people willing to accept it. But I am suspicious that the "me time" argument is in reality a rationalization to make what would generally be unacceptable appear acceptable.
And as an appeal to the emotional side, you have one life. Do you really want to spend 10% of your life on a bus every month?
Of course, I like being only 15 minutes from home. But I miss having that external crutch a bit.
In comparison, when I take the train, I arrive at the station a leisurely 15 minutes early. And I sit in a gigantic chair (compared to the plane) for those six hours. And they have free coffee and wifi. And the desk at my chair is not a baby's highchair platform, but an actually usable work surface. So I work.
And while the food isn't high quality, it's better than anything I've ever had on an airplane. Burgers and pizza and beer. Or fresh salads and coldcut sandwiches. Candy, granola bars, teas, water. It's a small convenience store.
No, I don't spend my time commuting. I spend my client's time commuting. Working on the train is the closest thing to teleporting I think any of us will come to in our lifetime.
The long commute lets me be close to my parents, in a neighborhood my wife likes, $1100 rent for a 2 bedroom in NYC, etc.
90 minutes is Rhinebeck/Poughkeepsie. Plenty of country and suburbia places for $1100.
Not to mention those "Working from Home" tech workers, who are most of the time not even at home and rarely working :P
https://books.google.com/books?id=_h4eF9H9UtQC&pg=PA93&dq=%2...
I do about 2 hours a day when I'm not biking, but because we have a strong remote-work culture, I find myself working from home more and more, and expect to be fully remote pretty soon.
I'm not going to try to get used to it, never again. Life is too short to waste that much of it in hell. I won't even consider a job with a bad commute anymore. If that limits my employment prospects, so be it - I have a life to live!
We really needed to build rail in the space where we added a toll lane.
The time honestly dissapears... Podcasts and/or audio books.
The scary part is how much time is spent on "auto-pilot".
At one point in my life I lived a block from work, and put in 12-14 hours every day and fielded calls 2-3 times a week at 2-3am. That's no different than an 8-10 hour a day job with a 4 hour commute and pager duty.
When I was single it was ok - I had many friends at work and that was our life. I wouldn't try to do it with a family.
When introverts read or are productive on their commute, why not? But I currently struggle with a 30 min commute and have become a podcast addict.